We got the chance to sit down and talk with SDL Marketing Manager Rebecca Liebling ahead of her appearance at this year's Europe's Customer Festival in September.

Total Customer: What solutions will you showcase at Europe's Customer Festival this September?

Rebecca Liebling: SDL will be showcasing our Campaign Management and Analytics technology that lets marketers take data from multiple sources and use the technology to analyse and segment the information. The resulting insights enable these marketers to intiate and sustain relevant, profitable interactions with customers – thus helping them cut through the noise and make sense of all the data that will enable them to better understand their customers.

TC: What differentiates your offering from others in the online and digital marketing space?

RL: As a business we offer three core solution areas: analytics, campaign management and intelligent email. What differentiates us is that all these technology strands can either sit together or be used in isolation. What we find often is that people are trying to solve one problem rather than a bigger issue, so whilst they might need to obtain insight or need to improve their campaign orchestration, it's very rare they are trying to fix the whole problem at once.

Therefore, it's reassuring to our customers to know that when they move on to solve the next problem further down the line they have a system that natively integrates together. This ultimately future proofs purchasing decisions made by clients.

TC: What challenges do you think your clients are face in the next 1 – 2 years?

RL: There are several things going on at the moment, it's a shame that it's still true, but siloed data remains a huge challenge. Now there are many more and much larger silos of data within most organisations because of web, mobile and social data from interactions. Businesses are struggling to pull this data together and understand which parts are important. It's about relevancy, which in turn allows decisions to be made on data that's of no import to the business.

Another challenge is social. It's moved from a very separate discipline when businesses were recruiting young social entrepreneurs who got social but didn't necessarily understand the wider business case or traditional marketing strategies. Social seems to be going through the next iteration in which marketers are asking how to blend social into the traditional marketing mix. Email was in a similar position five years ago before it was integrated into traditional database marketing – mobile is going through a similar journey.

TC: Do you think that the customer is becoming more savvy, what impact do you see that having on your clients?

RL: Without a doubt, customers are trending towards becoming much more savvy. In a way they are able to manipulate brands into treating them the way they want to be treated. Some very savvy people out there are able to represent themselves over social sites in order to be treated in a certain way. They understand their social value and are able to offer this to brands for a price.

TC: If you had to give a tip to your customer to help them overcome these challenges, what would it be?

RL: I would always recommend to clients that they don't try to "boil the ocean." There are usually ways to take small steps and if we within businesses get bogged down with massive definitions of projects and huge budgets with lots of sponsors involved, we'll struggle to make the steps that we need to in what is fundamentally an incredibly fast moving environment.

Don't wait, otherwise it'll pass you by and don't wait because you won't – as an individual – get the results that you're looking for. There are plenty of companies who can help you take a small step and a right step in order to prove value to the rest of the business before you make a more significant investment.

Push these businesses hard to do something that helps you demonstrate this value, rather than trying to offer you big all singing and all dancing projects.

TC: Finally, what are the three main things you're looking forward to most at Europe's Customer Festival in September?

RL: Brand awareness, promotion and development. We want to position SDL within a leading industry event to a significant and strong audience.

Interacting within the greater âmarketing ecosystem' – the delegates, the vendors, the speakers. All of these add up to, and feed our, marketing intelligence and experience – thus enabling us to ensure our solutions are kept up-to-date.

Building new partnerships. We want to meet individuals with problems we know how to solve, with whom we can do interesting and award-winning work with.

You'll be able to meet Rebecca and SDL at this year's Europe's Customer Festival so you can find out more about what they can offer you and your business.